Flexiant to play key role as Cloud expert

Flexiant has announced its involvement with the multi-national FP7 S-CASE project. S-CASE aims to provide cloud-based services and tools for rapid software prototyping based on user requirements and system models. As a result, the project is expected to majorly reduce the time required between the conceptualisation of a software system and its first prototype, to improve the cost of a development process.

Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator will be used to provide the cloud infrastructure to support the project. As part of the project team, Flexiant will apply our expertise in speed to market. This will involve externalizing ownership and management, using predictable pay-as-you-go on-demand billing and costing mechanisms, avoiding high capex barriers to entry and negating the need for training and highly paid systems administrators by externalizing resources and considering the needs of the software developer.

Craig Sheridan, Flexiant's Head of Research Projects said, “S-CASE should offer the opportunity to gain further understanding of how autonomous IaaS providers can work together to offer parts of an overall service. This will enable Flexiant to improve interoperability with cloud services and provide functionality for service providers to enable innovation.”

S-Case combines organisations from a number of European countries including: University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom); Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece); Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (Greece); DELPHIS (Greece); University of Insubria (Italy); Ericsson Nikola Tesla (Croatia); Engineering Ingegneria Informatica (Italy) and Akquinet Tech (Germany).

As part of the S-Case project three pilot applications will be developed and deployed in real operational environments by two industrial partners and one SME to showcase how S-CASE can successfully meet different needs and technology requirements in the three domains of energy, social networks and cloud computing infrastructure.

Project coordinator, Assistant Professor of Software Engineering with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, said: “It is common knowledge that most software projects fail due to incomplete and/or misleading requirements (what the client envisions and how the developed system will support it). S-CASE will automatically transform requirements provided into reusable software artefacts, which will in turn be composed into fully functional cloud services. S-CASE is expected to enable: a) the identification of system specifications and the design of software from user input, and (b) the discovery and synthesis of composite workflows of software artefacts from distributed open source and proprietary resources that fulfil the inserted system requirements in the best possible way. S-CASE can be seen as a search-engine for software modules.”